- The US transportation industry moves a lot of freight.…In 2012, trucks transported more than 13 billion tons…of freight on US highways…while trains carried more than 2 billion tons on the rails.…Moving rail cars from train yards to depots…helps maintain balance in that part…of the transportation infrastructure.…In this chapter,…I'm going to look at a transportation problem…that involves moving rail cars from yards to depots.…What we want to do is find the cheapest way…to supply rail depots with cars…and we know that cars from a given rail yard…can be delivered to a depot at a given cost.…

We also know that depots have requirements.…They need certain numbers of cars on a given day,…and yards have storage capacities.…It doesn't do any good to ask a yard for more cars…that they can deliver.…Finally, the cost to supply is usually based on…the distance traveled.…It takes a lot more to move a train car…from Wilmington, Delaware to Newport News, Virginia…than it does to move the same car…from Wilmington to Denver.…So what are the elements of a transportation problem?…

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Released

6/22/2015

Learn how to use Solver, a free Excel add-in, to find optimal solutions to problems with multiple constraints, including linear and nonlinear mixtures, transportation problems, and scheduling conflicts. Along the way, author Curt Frye shows how to organize Excel worksheets for use with Solver, add and swap data, and set each problem's criteria in Solver. In the final chapter, you'll learn how to analyze Solver's results, create scenarios, and change parameters by hand.